Liquid products, for example juices and the like, are usually preserved by heat treatment and preferably filled into containers in a hot state. Heat treatment is, for example, pasteurization in a flash pasteurizer. Such plants usually comprise a heater for performing heat treatment and a preheating unit for preheating the product to a suited inlet temperature before heat treatment, and a correction cooler for cooling the product temperature to a suited filling temperature after heat treatment.
To this end, it is known, for example from DE 29710507 U1, to recover waste heat from product cooling and use it for heating the following product.
From DE 10351689 A1, it is furthermore known for heating already filled-in product to collect heating and cooling water from individual stages of a bottle cooling tunnel and to return them to individual stages of the bottle cooling tunnel corresponding to the respective temperature of the water employed for spraying the bottles in order to thus employ thermal energy as efficiently as possible.
In flash pasteurizers, strongly varying quantities of the corresponding heat can arise in the individual plant sections depending on the operating state of the heat treatment plant, for example during starting, shutting down, interruptions of the filling process, and the like.
For a careful heat treatment of the product, it is in particular desirable that the treatment temperatures in the individual treatment stages are as uniform as possible and that the product can be treated at an overpressure that is as low as possible. However, this object can only insufficiently be achieved in the known treatment plants with heat recovery.
Therefore, there is a demand for methods for the regenerative flash pasteurization of flowing products and for correspondingly optimized treatment plants that are improved in this respect.